Thinking About SLP Contracting? Here’s What You Need to Know First to Prevent Burnout
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[00:00:00] So excited for today's episode because I have with me today Sarah Lockhart from the SLP Happy Hour, and I met her recently on her podcast and I was just so impressed with her and how authentic and sincere she is. I felt like I'm coming across a kindred spirit here. And I also appreciate her honesty. She really is going to share with you the ups and downs. She focuses a lot on self-care. It's not all about the work. There has to be a balance in which you put your oxygen mask on first, if you're going to make the world a better place and be the agent of change that you can be. We are blessed to have her here today. Sarah, what really intrigued me about you was your story.
You've really had a curvy path and you've shared what has worked and what has not worked, and I appreciate that transparency that you brought. And I think before we dive into your top [00:01:00] four recovery tips that we can all benefit from. Your history, we can benefit from as well.
Can you tell us your story before you dive in to the four strategies?
I've been an SLP for 17 years and starting out, I think that, and this will come up in our tips later on, I really had this, perfectionistic view of being an SLP and I was really unprepared for the realities of what it is to be an SLP. And I put a lot of pressure and guilt on myself early on in my career.
My early career was working at an elementary school as an employee. After that, I did quite a bit of contracting. That was hybrid telepractice, and then sometimes I would travel for in-person. Then I did that part-time and had a part-time private practice. Then during COVID, I, I was like, Ugh, the school's thing is so stressful.
I started to do full-time private practice. I did that for a few years, burnt out again, [00:02:00] uh, you know, work life balance, although that is what I talk about. I don't love the phrase because it's like balancing on a bicycle where you have to constantly readjust and sometimes you need to choose. What you're going to focus on.
While I was doing private practice, I had a physical location. I build insurance. I saw kids every day of the week and I had a lot of AAC and a lot of autism. And what I found is, as a culture, we don't support those families. So I was seeing kids who had a lot of needs, families who had a lot of needs and weren't supported by our society.
And situations in which there needed to be a lot of consult, family training, teacher training, and all of that started to really weigh down on me. In addition to the loneliness, the isolation of being a sole practitioner at a solo practice, that was really hard. So I quit midyear. So October I thought, you know what?
I [00:03:00] can't do this anymore. And, some of that had to do with some personal things. I had a parent who wasn't doing well with their health. I have a 10 year infertility journey where we finally decided that we were just done because I couldn't keep going. And, there was so much pressure on me at the time that I decided that I can't do this.
I can't shoulder this, I can't have my work be my name. Because it was October, I took a Telepractice contract, and that was last school year, so a year ago. And. Really enjoyed having working from home, having more time going back into the school system. And then now my job is full-time preschool for the county.
Things that I appreciate so much about working in public service is I'm working with kids no matter if their parents can afford it or not. I have coworkers who I can [00:04:00] ask when things get hard. I have groups of children rather than one-on-one, and I see so much growth with groups. That's something I missed in private practice because for billing reasons you can't often
see groups and just the community feel of helping kids in person in my own community has been really satisfying.
For me, I would say private practice was not the end all, be all. It was great for the time that I did it, but it started to really wear down on me. And as I had things in my personal life that needed my attention, it no longer became the best situation for me.
What I appreciate about this profession is when you need to make a change, even if it's not the beginning of the school year, bam, you've got it. So I've appreciated that and I am enjoying being an employee and not having all of that pressure rest on my shoulders, doing my best, having a [00:05:00] boss. Having coworkers who are also SLPs and really having more of a community feel, because as SLPs, we can be so isolated and solo private practice is the most isolating I've ever f, the most isolated I've ever felt. Second to sometimes I did feel that in Telepractice as well.
You are honest. This is hard.
Let's go back because a lot of people are struggling. You were an elementary speech pathologist in a public school. Mm-hmm. Oftentimes you have one speech pathologist and that public school at the elementary age, she or he has 80 kids on their caseload. They have all of this paperwork, all of these meetings, and the demands are too high for the capacity.
A lot of the speech pathologists I know in that situation are working till eight o'clock at night every night doing the paperwork and doing the therapy back to back [00:06:00] during the day. There's no breaks. There was no boundaries. I think it's interesting.
I have a wonderful school district I work for, we have three full-time speech pathology positions available for elementary speech language pathologists that cannot be filled. Mm-hmm. Does that tell us something? Yes. This, the demands of this job are just too hard for anyone to handle, so something's gotta change. And I think that's why a lot of people become contractors.
That's why I became a contractor, because I thought, you know what? This school district. I loved working there. I was very sad to leave. I tell this story all the time, but I was crying so hard the day I left that my husband had to come pick me up 'cause I couldn't drive the car because I couldn't see because there were so many tears.
You really grow to love the community you work in and the kids you work with, the teachers you work with, and. [00:07:00] To me, the next step was to become a contractor, which I did for many years as well. And I think that's because I wanted another level of protection from unrealistic demands, from overwork, and I wanted to be an hourly employee, so I would be paid for the hours I worked.
And the understanding would be if it didn't all get done. I couldn't bill for that, so the job was too big. When I was salaried, I felt, and maybe this was just my own perfectionism, it is my job to fulfill every single thing that, this workplace wants me to do. And if I can't do it, it's my fault.
That's what I thought early on in my career. And so that guilt was, I need to get all the work done. I need to work late hours. I need to really care about this. I need to research this. I need to take more classes for this one kid, even though I have, you know, 80 kids, to learn more about this.
Disorder area. And so contracting to me became like a cushion where I could feel [00:08:00] more comfortable to just do the work within the working hours and not overwork so much. And I do think that that's why so many SLPs are moving to contracting rather than being an employee of a public agency, which is too bad because that ends up being more expensive for that public agency.
You bring up so many good points in that response because we know how burnout is caused. Burnout is caused when the expectations exceed what a person is capable of physically or mentally doing. It's like the expectations exceed. And when you have a contract, you have, this is what I can do, and this is the pay you're going to get.
The scale is equal. You work an hour, you get paid for an hour. If you're working 14 hour days and you're getting paid for six hours in that day, the scale is not equal. So it's a just a, a [00:09:00] logical balance. And I think that's why 50% of special educators leave the profession within five years.
75% within 10 years. Because the scale, it isn't equal. The demands are too high. And I can see where contract work being paid by the hour puts one equals one. I'm working for public schools in this situation and I'm working for public schools in this situation.
The only difference is I'm paid as a salary here and here it's by the hour, so things are equal. Then you went into private practice. I thought it was interesting what you said about private practice because what I found in my research is that insurance companies doesn't pay for coaching parents and families how to use the AAC devices that's not covered.
So you are, once again, you have this scale and, and your high expectations are, I'm an agent of change. I'm teaching the [00:10:00] child AAC I'm gonna teach the family A, a c, and their teacher A, a c, that's not covered. Mm-hmm. So, once again, it's not one equals one equals one hour equals 10 hours of work. Exactly.
It's your conscience that's telling you this isn't working. Yeah. It's not your exhaustion. It's like saying, no, I'm here to make the world a better place and I'm not doing it because I can't.
I'm not given the resources to do it.
The teletherapy model.
Mm-hmm. So the current research speech pathologists are loving teletherapy and it's effective. Yep. Your story is so important because
you've been on those back porches of different lives and people are thinking, would it be better if I did contract work or worked for a public school? Would it be better if I did teletherapy or in person? Would it be better if I did private practice or this? And you've been on those back porches and you know the pros and cons and [00:11:00] doing this for 17 years.
You're coming from, I'm an agent of change. My mission is to make the world a better place, and I, I'm gonna give every ounce of blood I have to make that happen. Mm-hmm. So, so that, that's really unique because it's not, we're, we're not talking to someone who's like, well, I'm here to make as much money as I can, or, I'm here to have as much vacation time as possible, or, I'm here for the benefits, or I'm here for the recognition..
Now I'm in Teletherapy. Is it a hundred percent teletherapy through the contract company for the public schools that you do today? For the last year, yes.
I felt like I could actually plan my sessions. I wasn't pulled in the hallway to listen to so and so. But it's also a challenge to get to know the staff and to build trust with the parents because whenever I go to a new school, initially the parents are like, oh, teletherapy, that can't work.
Now that families have had negative experiences with school during the COVID time in which we were in a pandemic, it was [00:12:00] difficult for the entire staff. Teachers were not trained on how to do this, and outcomes for many families were not good. So it really is difficult to kind of sell telepractice, even though we know it works.
And so that's another challenge of telepractice.
That's a good point. If you don't have buy-in, you're not gonna go anywhere because the kid's not even gonna show up for therapy and they're gonna be like, oh, he's tired today and no one's gonna be next to the child, to help you along in the process perhaps.
There was a recent study that I find fascinating. Where they did random controlled trial teaching AAC. They did the home visit in the child's bedroom to teach them the picture exchange communication system, which some people like, some people don't like, but it is evidence-based. And then they did it online and the same gains as going to the child's bedroom and sitting in their bedroom and using their toys and doing it hands on versus doing it through a teletherapy model.
They kept [00:13:00] everything the same. It was just, it's in your bedroom or it's through the computer screen. That, to me, speaks volumes. This is for children with autism? Mm-hmm. and AAC Yeah. Which is a challenge. Yeah. Which is a challenge. It's one thing, it's like, oh yeah, it's teletherapy is the same for an elementary age child that's working on the R sound, but it's like, this is a child with sensory issues, all these other things that come with autism and they, they had equal gains.
I did that for. More than five years, but less than 10 years. At, at year 17, your brain gets kind of foggy about how long you've done what, and there were preschoolers. And there they would have a teaching assistant with them. Right. In California, in the classroom. So it's like a kind of a controlled environment. You have assistants on the other side. You've done teletherapy preschool age through high school.
What you think is don't do contract work. And it's like, oh, contract is awesome. It's much better to have a private practice, be your own employer. Mm-hmm. So hard. That's what I [00:14:00] thought. You know, so it just all, and, and people that do have their own private practice, like with insurance companies, they've had these awkward things with the insurance companies covering therapy, and then the next month they stopped.
Mm-hmm. And then you suddenly have this bill for hundreds of dollars to give to the parent for last month that insurance didn cover. So there was a, did you have moments like that where Yeah, and I had insurance companies that didn't have enough staffing to pay me, so I was pretty sure I was going to get paid, but I hadn't gotten paid in six months.
I am the breadwinner and the main income earner for my family. I do work full-time. So while I think perhaps private practice would be a great fit for someone who's like a secondary income earner or who works part-time to rely on it as your bread and butter. It can be stressful because it really goes up and down.
Overall, I did great. It was a successful practice. Month to month it is all over the place. There were months when I got paid very little and there were months where [00:15:00] I got paid a lot. So it involves a lot of saving and extra work to make it work. Alright, well thank you so much for all of that information because what you're telling us is like these are the demands and capacities of each of these positions.
Because one thing that's great about being a speech pathologist is the world's your oyster. You can pick. I wanna work with this population in this setting and in this location. We're in a position where you get to pick. The world is at your fingertips. Let's talk about this pre-retirement job.
The experts recommend that you have a job before you retire, which is a little bit less demanding, physically mentally, and you look at the neat thing is you can evolve to positions in this field of speech pathology that are less demanding. I'm working with young preschoolers with developmental disabilities and autism. I have a [00:16:00] caseload of 50 children. It's rewarding work, but it's intense. For instance, I could go into teletherapy working with children at elementary age.
That would be less physically demanding than working with children that have autism at the preschool level. The career can evolve with you and a lot of experts recommend having this pre-retirement job before you retire. I think that's exciting about the field of speech pathology is that in your life, there's always gonna be a perfect place for you where you can use your talents and make the world a better place.
Thank you so much for giving us a peek on all those different back porches that if I was, I would love to have talked to you when I graduated with my degree. And it's like, what do you wanna do? Here's the pros, here's the cons. I've been there, done that.
So now we're talking about recovery. You've come with us with your top four tips that you would recommend for speech language [00:17:00] pathologists to recover so that they can be their best and do their best. Make the world a better place.
So this is lessons that I've learned the hard way from my 17 years of being an SLP. So there are perspective shifts that are like big picture perspective shifts that have led to meaningful, practical, everyday changes for me in my work, they have lowered my stress, they have increased my satisfaction.
But briefly, I wanted to start at the beginning when I was in grad school. Here's the things I thought. I thought students would always have a steady upward growth curve, right? Like at a 45 degree angle or whatever. That would always go up, up and up if I was quote unquote doing therapy, right? I thought sessions that didn't go according to plan meant I was doing something wrong.
So I would feel really guilty. I would wrestle with imposter syndrome. I thought that if I planned unprepared enough sessions, would. Be smooth. And if they weren't, I had done something wrong. I was not [00:18:00] prepared. I didn't have enough information. And then I also thought that if I put more work into the job, I would be a better SLP.
I don't know if you relate to any of those, Kelly. So some of the perspectives were a product of my grad school and sort of the over planning and over preparation they make you do, and that's a part of learning and I don't have a problem with that to a certain extent, you have to do that if you're gonna get good at what you do.
And some of that is my own personality. So I have a tendency to think deeply, overanalyze, overthink, and I just so badly wanna do a good job. So the first five years or so, especially the first two years of my career, were really challenging. And I think that I have had guilt, stress, imposter syndrome. I've dealt on and off with burnout, stress overthinking my sessions.
These are tips. That have helped me reduce the imposter syndrome and overthinking and have a more balanced and [00:19:00] satisfied perspective on the profession. And the first one is one that I learned during COVID when things got really, really hard in my personal life, in my work life. So early on in my career, I spent tons of hours at work.
I was always researching, taking CEUs, thinking about work. I gave all my energy to work. I would come home totally exhausted and I realized my whole life was wrapped around my identity as an SLP and my work. So one change I made is I decided I was going to give 50% of my energy to my work and 50% to my home life. And this changed me a lot because I was giving like 110% I was giving at work until I was completed.
Completely depleted. And when this happened, I also made a promise to myself to prioritize my work outside of life, above my work. To me that meant developing more hobbies, spending more time with friends and [00:20:00] family, and really making that out of work time richer. So. Pre change. I was too tired to do anything post change.
I was reserving some energy for my evenings and weekends and I was trying new things. So I started a book club. I tried new hobbies. I made candles colored, did puzzles, but I also got really interested in korean dramas, K dramas, and Chinese dramas C dramas. So if anyone listening is interested, my favorites are both on Netflix, hometown Cha Chacha, and Crash Landing on You. Also learned about WebToons, which are episodic digital comics that you get through the WebToons app. They originated from South Korea and the storytelling is really good. So those are just examples. Hobbies are important things that we do outside of work is important, and by reserving that energy for your out of work time and making that time richer, you can diversify your identity.[00:21:00]
And when you have a bad day at work, it's just a bad day at work because you have a rich life. You have interesting conversations, you have things that you are curious about outside of work, and you're really building that. So that's the first tip. That's wonderful. It is like you can't have a table that has one leg
on that table. And that one leg is just work and, or you will fall over.
We'll go to the second tip. The second thing I learned from burnout and to restore is that spending time worrying about work doesn't make me a better SLP and working more doesn't make me a better SLP, so I really care about my job, my students, but when we're trying to lean towards self-improvement, sometimes that has a dark side, which is self-criticism, guilt, being too hard on ourselves.
And if you care, if you're conscientious, if you tend to [00:22:00] overthink, it can be a challenge of this wanting constant growth in yourself to come to the point that you're pushing yourself to grow. Too hard, you're not resting enough and. Rumination is something that I learned the word for in the term for, and it really helps me and it's getting into worry loops with your thoughts.
Maybe the train is leaving the station, but it's just going in a circle and coming right back. So that's when we have these thoughts about like something bad that happened at work or a really hard group, but we're not getting anywhere with that thought. So rumination. Isn't productive, but it feels productive because again, the train is leaving the station and it's moving, but it's just coming right back to the original station.
So going through my lower years when things were hard again, the development of hobbies, relationships, outside the profession helped and diversifying, separating my identity from my work really [00:23:00] helped. And over time. I realized that my overwork was not helping me do my job better. I realized that over planning and like laminating things and spending a lot of time with lesson planning was not making my sessions any better, and I realized that once I had a really fully developed life outside of work.
Things didn't feel as big. Whereas before, when I was working all the time, if I had a hard day at work, I would also have a hard day at home. So things would feel big, like on a scale of one to five, a conflict with a parent and an IEP meeting might feel like a five versus now it feels like a two because it's just one slice of the entire pie.
That is my whole life. So once I did this imposter syndrome faded. A bad day was just part of the job. It was something that happened and it wasn't a [00:24:00] personal failure. Also, I realized I couldn't get all the work done, even if I worked the extra hours, so I'm not going to work the extra hours. I realized that I set the pace of my work, so I'm not gonna work frantically at a frantic pace all day long.
I'm gonna work at a sustainable pace all day long. And I also recognized I wasn't a bad SLP for not knowing about every disorder. There's just our scope of practice is so huge, we can't know everything about everything. So I still worry about work. I can still be hard on myself, but by realizing that spending a lot of time, lesson planning and prepping materials doesn't result in gains for my students and overworking to do the paperwork aspect doesn't result in me being a better SLP.
Any real meaningful gains day to day? I stopped as much as I could both overworking and overthinking about work. Not to say I'm perfect.
I love what you're saying because if you're really getting to knowing yourself. And everyone has what I call [00:25:00] their shadows and they show up in speech therapy and I know for myself, my shadow is that I can be over-motivated to create change. I can be like, " I have a vision for this child and, and I'm gonna take 'em over here and you gotta meet the child where they are. Mm-hmm. And it's like, no, first we need to build a relationship. We gotta take a month building a relationship, and then we're, we can dive in with the complex treatment targets that are going to create major change.
But, I think that everyone, and for yourself, you're talking about your shadow and if you were to describe like a word to describe that shadow, it almost seems like perfectionism. Mm-hmm. That is your shadow, you're kryptonite. Mm-hmm. That idea. If I just work harder and if I just know more, and if I just do better, then things are gonna go perfectly.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I am just like, I know what this child needs. [00:26:00] We need to do X, Y, and Z, but the child's at a, mm-hmm. I know my shadow, right? Mm-hmm. And if you don't, it's gonna be like pulling teeth. The whole time if you don't acknowledge your shadow and, and, and deal with it
That's an excellent recovery tip number two.
Three: spending more time lesson planning, prepping sessions doesn't make me a better SLP and spending more time writing IEPs doesn't make me a better SLP. This is to your point, what you were just talking about a second ago, which is we need to define what success means for us, which for me, success means that I am present during sessions.
I have formed a satisfying relationship with my job where I'm not overworking and completely depleted, and I have done what I can while working a reasonable pace. I think for every SLP, it's really healthy to be like, who do we help? How do we help them? And what is our version [00:27:00] of success? So for a long time I thought if I got all the work done, that was success.
So thinking about planning for sessions, I do want to acknowledge that the first five years or so of your career, you just don't have materials. Or you don't know really what to use. So it will take more time to lesson plan, but after that, you should be able to have an activity and a target for most sessions and just go for it.
And the idea that I had, again, from grad school in that sort of over preparation was that I was a bad SLP for not spending more time on this, but I realized. Whether I spend more time planning or less time planning, the session will go about the same because there is a factor we can't control for, which is the child or the children.
They will surprise us. So I like having a basic idea for how the session will go, observing the child and adjusting if needed, and. Remember [00:28:00] again, you determine your success rubric, not your boss, not your coworkers. And you can't do it all. For example, if a student isn't making progress, I'll be like, was I present?
If I didn't know what to do, did I research? And if so, I did my best. So my own focus is making an impact, finding satisfaction with what I do, given the resources and time available. No more. No less. So just that, again, it is a secondary reminder that spending more time on your work doesn't make you a better SLP, and it doesn't even result in better outcomes for the kids you work with.
I couldn't agree with you more. Be present. That's when the magic is gonna happen when you're a hundred percent present. And when I think about that, I always think about early on in my career when I'm being observed. And when you're being observed, you're like, I need to do things. And that's when you're gonna do the worst therapy.
The worst teaching, because the child will spew out like an F [00:29:00] word, a swear word. And normally you would ignore it, but you're like, "Oh, I'm being observed. I need to say. Those that we use those word in the bathroom, " because I need to do things. I'm getting paid here. This idea is that , doing more is not more. The more I prepare, the more peeved I get when, when I need to be flexible. And so at least for me, it doesn't help to, to really prepare lessons in detail.
Tip four is to make good mistakes. This is a phrase that I learned recently from a book I read, and so a good mistake is not a failure. It's taking a session that goes sideways, processing and making a plan for the next time. Even if you want, you can make a chart that says, you know, the good, the bad, and next.
I can think of a session that. I had this week that did not go great. I could not, this child was just not [00:30:00] stim for KRG. I used everything in the book and they just weren't ready. Like I needed to move on to another. The good, he paid attention, the bad, the minus is that we just couldn't get that sound.
Next, we're gonna choose another sound, and we're gonna talk about tongue tip up, tongue tip down front and back of tongue, like the anatomy pieces. When things go sideways. It is not because you are a failure. A mistake is not a failure. A good mistake is one where we can see the good, the bad, and make a plan for next time.
Again, that has really helped me with imposter syndrome because I don't feel like it's a personal affront to me. If something didn't go as planned or as I expected it to go, I accept that I'm going to find something good in it. I'm gonna find a challenge, and then I'm gonna figure out what to do next.
And then, especially if I write it down, I'm able to just let it go. The final tip is to make good mistakes, and then how I do it is with that [00:31:00] process that I just described.
I think that a lot of it has to do with ego. This is not about me being good at what I do or bad at what I do.
Ego, you just have no place for it when you're working with colleagues as well. There's no 'better than'. There's no wrong and Right. It's an all of the above. I find that a lot of my colleagues have a different superpower.
For instance, in working with children with autism, they approach it totally differently than I do and we're equally effective.
I love that because if you look at social media. There's one way to do this, and you have to buy a course in order to do it. And if you're doing it any way, that isn't exactly how the teacher does it, it is quote unquote wrong. And the opposite of imposter syndrome is not confidence. It's self-trust. And once you've been an SLP for a few years. You can remind yourself, I have been through a situation similar to this. I [00:32:00] have problem solved through it, and that doesn't mean I don't have more to learn, but it does mean that there are lots of ways the cookie crumbles.
There are lots of ways to get good results and this very simplified message that's online in order to sell things and through marketing. I think there's a lot of unethical marketing going on is that there is one way to do it. You are doing it wrong. You need to pay money. So that you do it right?
Yeah, and I think unfortunately what I'm seeing, because I teach graduate students, I'm seeing more and more of them buy into the silos. And they're like. They, they, they're following into this person, and this is how this person does it, and this is what this person says. Follow the prescription, and if you're not following the prescription, you're doing bad therapy. It's so unfortunate because as you were saying, best practice is an 'all of the above' proposition in what you do with one child might be totally [00:33:00] different than what you do with the next child. Because the person online doesn't know your student.
And each student is so unique. And of course it's gonna happen more to people earlier in their professions because you are still developing that self-trust versus like, I'm lucky enough to have done this for 17 years. So I've got mostly that self-trust. But still times things will happen where I fall into the marketing and I think, oh my gosh, I'm using a visual schedule.
And they say, that's wrong. Well, for some kids it's predictable, it reduces anxiety and they ask for it. So that's just one example of something that I've. Someone online has told me I'm doing wrong and I have to say, I know the child and I know myself, and I have self-trust that this is going to work. And because again, I'm reflecting on my sessions and I'm reading research, if it doesn't work, I will find a way that works.
And that doesn't mean we're not listening to other people, but I think. One of the best things that I've learned [00:34:00] from the neurodiversity movement, and I'm just so thankful for it and through my own autistic friends, is that as SLPs, we can think that we're awfully flexible, but we can fall into that structured.
Do A, then B, then C. If C doesn't happen, you're a bad SLP and you should feel imposter syndrome. And I think that there are so many ways to do this job well. There are so many per permutations of humans, both as SLPs and as children. So as SLPs, I get to practice in a way that works for me.
I might work next to a type BSLP who doesn't plan at all and who has sensory bins. I will never do that because it's messy as heck. Things go on the floor and it would make me honestly anxious. So I practice so differently from that SLP, but that does not mean she's doing it wrong because she has every right to practice in the way that works for her.
Just as I have every right to practice in a way that works for me. Just as every child [00:35:00] deserves a therapeutic environment in which they can be free, comfortable, play, and practice new skills. Those are so many different perspectives involved that this is a human relationship and every session will look different.
So anytime you fall into that, 'this... then' that thinking, you kind of have to, at least if you're me, force yourself to pull yourself out out of it and to see the gray areas. That. Well, I think that is like an excellent way to end this.
And when you embrace your superpowers and you embrace the child and you understand this is our dance and we're not following steps. I like that you're closing with that thought and that it's, and to follow your intuition and to follow the child's lead. If there's one thing that you would recommend in a sentence of your experience for speech pathologist to be all they can be
[00:36:00] what would you say is your advice? I think it's what we just talked about. Allow yourself to have the freedom to practice the way you practice and the self-trust to know that it will work and give each client the freedom to fully be themselves in sessions with you so that they are in a supportive, calm, and encouraging therapeutic enviroment. Awesome. Where can we find you through social media?
What would you recommend if you like listening to podcasts? The SLP Happy Hour podcast is anywhere you listen to podcasts. I am on Instagram as SLP happy hour. Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you.
